Chuck Wolfe is an environmental and land use lawyer with a graduate degree in regional planning, and over 24 years of experience in environmental and land use law, innovative land use regulatory tools and sustainable development techniques.

Urbanist fantasies: a tribute to Seattle’s “little places”– and more

Click below for a multimedia tribute to Seattle’s “little places”: the industrial grates and covers which have graced urban rights-of-way since Roman times. These street-level barriers provide public safety and maintenance gateways to the inner workings of infrastructure. Like coins, they carry symbols and patterns from industrial process, often symbolizing local heritage or factory name.

And, in a crowning gesture to organic urban density from afar,Spinola Bay in St. Julian’s, Malta, is an icon of compact development in the small island country south of Sicily. Thanks to photo-manipulation, this historic locale of fishing boats and pirate ships also yields the urbanist fantasy community of “Density Bay”:

For more urban essays and photoessays, including several essays on pedestrian-related issues, see the blog myurbanist, here and Crosscut, here.